{"id":5586,"date":"2016-04-25T06:19:41","date_gmt":"2016-04-25T10:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5586"},"modified":"2016-05-09T07:12:54","modified_gmt":"2016-05-09T11:12:54","slug":"a-hologram-for-the-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5586","title":{"rendered":"A Hologram for the King"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TomNot every comedy is for everyone (at least I think<\/em> this was supposed to be a comedy). Last week I saw The Big Lebowski<\/em> (1998) at the local movie theater. Packed. People in Lebowski t-shirts, people who raised hands to show they\u2019d seen the movie five, ten, twenty times, people anticipating the laugh lines. Eighteen years from now, nothing like that will happen with this film (trailer<\/a>) from German director Tom Twyker.<\/p>\n

Tom Hanks is American businessman Alan Clay, whose marriage is over and whose career as a salesman is on the skids. In what appears to be a last chance at success, he\u2019s sent to Saudi Arabia to sell the king on a costly holographic teleconferencing system for a new city being built in the desert. He encounters bureaucratic delays, clandestine alcohol consumption, confounding cultural gaps, and unexpected romance.<\/p>\n

Where I messed up was in thinking, \u201cOh, Tom Hanks. He\u2019s always great.\u201d Someone so talented just wouldn\u2019t be in a mediocre film. Why would he? And, I thought, \u201cOh, Dave Eggers wrote the book it\u2019s based on. Got lots of praise for it too.\u201d For example, New York Times<\/em> reviewer Pico Iyer<\/a> called the book \u201can anguished investigation into how and where American self-confidence got lost and \u2014 in the central word another lonely expat uses for Alan\u2014 \u2018defeated.\u2019\u201d And the Boston Globe:<\/em> \u201cTrue genius.\u201d<\/p>\n

Someplace along the way, the promise of the book and Hanks got lost, and a more disjointed and implausible narrative is hard to imagine. When we\u2019re told that the crowds Hanks saw at a mosque were there because \u201cthat\u2019s where the executions are,\u201d it\u2019s hard to believe that a Saudi woman would take the very great risk of being alone with him, an American infidel.<\/p>\n

Hanks does<\/em> get to drive a very sexy 2015 Audi R8, briefly. But even that isn\u2019t worth the ticket price.<\/p>\n

Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> critics rating 62%; audiences 95%. (I can only assume they don\u2019t have many viewer ratings yet. IMDb viewers give it 6.3 stars out of 10.)
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